Lieutenant (9 page)

They had left the river behind on their journey west, but on the second day they found it again. Along the bank a path had been worn by feet before theirs.

‘Ah,’ the governor exclaimed. ‘At last we may meet some natives!’

Rooke wondered how an exchange might begin. By going forward and offering words, he supposed. That first day on the beach, he should have tried fewer trinkets and more words. He had missed another opportunity the day those two men had passed his hut.

He would not miss a third chance. He rehearsed it: the laying down of the musket, the stepping towards them with empty hands outstretched. He would not wait for the governor, he would take the initiative. But then? How would the dialogue start?

No natives appeared to put the question to the test, but a hundred and thirty-four paces later they saw trees bleeding red sap from fresh scars. Two hundred and seven paces further brought them to a cluster of native huts and a smouldering fire.

‘They cannot be far away,’ Willstead said.

‘That is perfectly true, Lieutenant,’ the governor replied. ‘What a shame it is that we do not know in which direction.’

The bushes and trees around them could have hidden an army.

‘Where are they?’ the governor demanded irritably. ‘Why do they hide from us?’

Willstead took it on himself to answer.

‘I imagine, sir, that they are waiting to see how we declare ourselves. When they understand our peaceable intentions they will approach.’

But the governor was too exasperated to want soft soap.

‘But when, Mr Willstead? When might they condescend to speak with us?’

The river widened and the land on either side curved upwards more gently, the undergrowth gone, the trees standing
apart from each other among grass. Here, as nowhere else, the idea of a gentleman’s park was not altogether ridiculous.

The governor called a halt.

‘Captain Silk, the trowel if you please.’

He dug up a handful of dark dirt and made a fist around it, inspecting the crumbling ball he produced. He peered, he sniffed. Was he going to taste it? Silk, standing solemnly by with the trowel, caught Rooke’s eye with a droll expression.

‘Lieutenant Rooke,’ the governor said, turning so that Silk had to re-arrange his face, ‘would you be so good as to note the location of this spot, it is my view that this soil would reward cultivation.’

Rooke got out his notebook and compass, took bearings from a nearby hill, drew a line representing the river, and generally made a big work of establishing where they were.

‘I am obliged to you, Lieutenant,’ the governor said, and favoured him with one of his squeezed smiles.

That evening Brugden was again given the gun and shot and boasted that this time he would bring back something better than opossum.

‘Put your minds at rest, gentlemen,’ he announced to Rooke and Willstead as he set off. ‘If there is anything worth eating out there, I promise you it will not get away. If it moves, well
then by God I shoot it!’

He swaggered off with the gun over his shoulder.

‘My mind was not especially agitated, in point of fact,’ Willstead muttered to Rooke. ‘That fellow has been given too much latitude, in my view.’

He watched Brugden go with a sourness he did not try to hide.

Half an hour later as they sat by the fire they heard the retort of a distant gun.

‘Dinner, I imagine,’ Silk said.

But a short time later there was a tremendous crashing down the hillside and Brugden burst out of the bushes, cap falling over one ear, his beard full of leaves, and a humid swollen look to one eye.

‘The buggers stoned me,’ he bellowed, ‘saving your presence, sir, but the damned buggers stoned me.’

He held out an arm, showing a swollen red graze.

The governor was not interested in the man’s arm.

‘What happened, Brugden,’ he snapped. ‘Quick to it now and tell me straight.’

At this Rooke thought the prisoner looked a little shifty. He struck Rooke as a man with a sharp assessment of where his own interests lay.

‘I never did nothing, sir,’ he said. ‘I were just walking along, I had got a couple of crows, I were just taking a bead on one of them opossums, then I get a stone smack in the back, another
on the arm here, the bushes was that thick I couldn’t see nothing, sir, not one thing!’

Like Rooke, the governor seemed to hear too much protest in this.

‘And then? Did you shoot? Out with it, man!’

Brugden’s beard made it easy for him to hide the expression on his face.

‘They was coming for me, they had the spears and the cudgels, I felt my life to be in danger, sir.’

‘So you did see them! Did you shoot?’

Brugden avoided his gaze, rubbing at the place on his arm and another place on his neck. His eye was almost closed.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said truculently. ‘I fired among the thick of them, sir, if not, sir, I’d be a dead man.’

The governor looked at the ground as if tamping down rage.

‘So you fired. Did you wound? Did any fall?’

‘Why, sir, I fired and then I run. I could not say what happened, I let off the gun then I ran like the blazes, I had the fear of God in me, sir.’

‘Brugden, I warned you, if you remember.’

The governor’s voice was so soft that Rooke had to lean in to hear.

‘I warned you, I told you, and now I will tell you once again. The survival of this settlement, and of all its members, depends in large degree on maintaining cordial relations with the natives.
Do you understand, man? There are too few of us, and God knows how many of them.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brugden said.

His rosy lips shaped the words like a small creature in the thicket of dark hair, then disappeared.

The mood of the party shifted with Brugden’s story. Rooke saw the governor have a word with Silk, saw Silk have a word with the sergeant, saw one of the privates take up position as guard. The sergeant discreetly gathered up the guns and loaded them in the shadows beyond the fire, then brought them back and laid them in a row.

Rooke supposed he should be frightened. In their different ways, he thought the others were. Brugden was surly, groaning each time he moved, squinting through his closed-up eye. Willstead got his stockings and shoes back on and sat on a log by the fire repeatedly clearing his throat like a man about to give his wedding speech. Silk slapped at the mosquitoes with larger gestures than necessary.

‘My God they are the size of sparrows, I swear, even though you would think them discouraged by the cold,’ he exclaimed. ‘Rooke, I have no doubt you hoped for natural curiosities unknown to science, but frankly, my friend, wondrous though you no doubt find them, I would as soon forgo the pleasure of their acquaintance.’

It was theatre, Rooke thought, the lit-up clearing by the fire a stage on which a performance was taking place, entitled
perhaps
His Majesty’s Men Defy the Foe
.

He chewed through his ration, making it last. Even crow soup would have been welcome. Something had happened out there in the woods about which Brugden was remaining silent. But if native warriors were planning to attack, a few muskets were not going to save them. Fear was what you felt when your actions could make a difference to what was about to happen. Eight men alone in this immensity of unknown could only wait and hope.

It was an uneasy night, but an uneventful one. They woke to long calm stripes of sunlight along the grass between the trees, and the carolling of birds welcoming the day. In sunlight, the row of loaded muskets seemed absurd.

That day they closed off the ragged three-quarter circle they had described and made their way back to where they had disembarked. As they glimpsed the boat through the trees the governor turned to Rooke.

‘First-rate navigating, Lieutenant Rooke. Well done.’

Gardiner had the boat neatly backed in to the shore. Rooke watched him read the governor’s face and see that the promised land of sweet pasture and talkative natives had not been found. He gave Rooke a private grimace that said,
Rather you than me
.

Rooke was pleased to be sitting in the boat taking his ease rather than stumbling along with his pack. But he had established himself as a
first-rate navigator
. That would not do him any harm at all. And that long blundering through a nameless land
was like the first meeting with a stranger: a promise of something better to come.

Silk had his pencil out and was jotting something down in his notebook and smiling at the words. Willstead had managed to get himself beside the governor but when the governor spoke, it was Silk he turned around to address.

‘That fertile area by the river is exactly what I hoped we might find,’ Rooke heard him say. ‘It looks fair to become the breadbasket of the colony, would you not say, Captain Silk?’

‘Indeed, sir,’ Silk said. ‘Very promising, a fair prospect indeed.’

He met Rooke’s glance but, with the governor next to him, even Silk did not dare wink.

Brugden’s eye was a regal shade of purple, and he had gone silent and grim. It was more than the pain, Rooke thought. The man had been humiliated, and would not forget it.

U
nusually, the governor was also at the next Sunday dinner at the barracks. As the officers took their places, he was already standing, leaning forward with his fingertips on the mahogany, barely containing his impatience.

‘Gentlemen,’ he started, before everyone was quite seated. ‘Gentlemen!’

Major Wyatt struck his fork against his wine glass and glared down the table at where Gosden was coughing.

‘I have to announce a highly important discovery, made on our recent expedition,’ the governor announced. ‘It is of a most excellently promising place for agriculture. The soil is of a surpassing fertility and well watered by a noble river. I have named the place Rose Hill.’

Rose Hill
, Rooke thought, that untamed place where no rose had ever grown? Where the soil was fertile only by comparison with the grey sand of Sydney Cove?

‘I have the intention of establishing a second settlement there, guarded by a small garrison. Captain Lennox has done me the honour of accepting the task.’

Everyone looked along the table to Lennox, who got to his feet, bowed his long bony body, and sat again. Rooke observed that he did not allow his spine to touch the back of the chair. Even sitting, Lennox was at attention.

‘Captain Lennox is to take a party of men and prisoners there as soon as practicable. Agriculture will be initiated at the earliest opportunity. I have every confidence that the place will rapidly feed our infant colony.’

Lennox blinked once, his face inscrutable. Around the table only Silk moved. One hand went to his hair and smoothed it back from his brow. His eyes found Rooke’s and his face moved in a flicker that no one could accuse of being a wink.

Confidence
was one word for the governor’s enthusiasm, Rooke thought. Another might be
delusion
. But the governor was paid to be optimistic. His fifteen hundred pounds a year would cease if the settlement were abandoned. Fifteen hundred pounds bought a great deal of confidence.

The governor held up his empty plate.

‘After that time, gentlemen, I can promise there will be no more of these!’

Wyatt demonstrated that the governor had made a joke by forcing a loud laugh. A few others joined in. Wyatt missed nothing, so Rooke quirked up the corners of his mouth in what he thought was probably a smirk, but even the worst smile was better than none.

The governor looked pleased at the reception of his pleasantry. He had grown paler and more brittle with every week that passed. Everyone knew that he was on meagre rations too, had even donated his private stock of flour into the common store.

‘In the short term, in order to supplement the diabolical morsel’—he bowed towards Silk— ‘I have decided to appoint two more prisoners to join Brugden as gamekeepers. Brugden is confident that they will be able to supply fresh meat on a regular basis and in considerable quantity.’

Rooke thought of Brugden, out there in the woods, that powerful chest, the gun as easy on his shoulder as if part of his body. He would be an efficient killer. Rooke imagined the woods like a body of water, in which the ripples of Brugden’s destruction would go out and out, wider and wider. With three men on the job, the place would soon be stripped of game.

‘On the matter of the natives,’ the governor went on, ‘it is a source of regret that they have proved so reluctant to come among us. I have every confidence that, if they were to do so, they would discover that we have nothing but good will towards
them. The obstacle has, of course, been the lack of opportunity to demonstrate such good will. I am, however, confident’—Rooke saw him hesitate, as if hearing his repetition of the word— ‘that this situation may shortly be rectified.’

Rooke felt for the man, watching him cling so fiercely to optimism. With every tree cut down, every yard of ground dug and planted, his need became more urgent: to convey to the natives that new masters of the soil had come upon their demesne. In the absence of any understanding about the new arrangements, Rooke could see that there was a dangerous ambiguity to the presence of a thousand of His Majesty’s subjects in this place. No such understanding was possible without language to convey it, and persons to whom the news could be delivered. And yet it seemed that the silence might continue indefinitely.

The governor would not have welcomed warfare, but Rooke thought he would have understood it. War was a species of conversation. But this silence was neither war nor peace. It was a null that paralysed the small frail figure straining to stand straight in front of his officers.

The pleasure of precision was one unsung by poets, as far as he knew, but for Rooke the small thrill of marking the afternoon readings of the instruments into the prepared spot in his ledger
never failed.
September 14, 1788 4 pm. Wind: NE, 8 knots
. If he were ever to attempt a poem, he thought he would take exactitude as his subject.

But how would he make rhymes out of the words he would have to use? Perhaps that was why there were no odes to the thermometer or the rain gauge.

Thinking about Silk, who could probably suggest such rhymes, there was an instant’s confusion in his mind as he saw that the man coming down the rocks towards him was not Silk, but Gardiner.

Rooke got up to welcome him. Gardiner would have even less idea than he did himself of how one might find a rhyme for thermometer, but the idea would entertain him.

Usually hearty, Gardiner greeted Rooke in a preoccupied way, sat at the table and downed in one swig his brandy-and-water.

Gardiner could be an odd sort of fellow. As another odd sort of fellow, Rooke knew how to be patient.

When Gardiner spoke, his voice cracked so he had to cough and start again.

‘It was not well done, Rooke,’ he said. ‘It was a shocking bad thing to do.’

‘What is it, old fellow, tell me?’ Rooke asked, to give Gardiner a little momentum. ‘I hear nothing out here. In my eyrie. You will have to tell me.’

Gardiner took a breath like a sigh.

‘You know the governor is wanting to speak to the natives, and they will not come near. He came up with a way to settle the thing. Decided in his wisdom to seize one or two by force. Teach them English, learn their tongue. Treat them well, so they would tell the others. It was me he picked to do the dirty work.’

He was silent for so long that Rooke thought he might say no more.

‘He was most particular,’ Gardiner said at last. ‘We were to take the cutter down to the cove inside North Head, someone had seen a party of natives there. We were to take some fish with us, lure a couple of the men away. You know how they love fish.’

He wiped a hand over his face.

‘We got ourselves backed into the shallow water there, held up the fish. Well, they were smart enough to be careful at the start. But we called and coaxed and dangled the damned fish… we grabbed two poor devils, they were slippery as eels and fought like the blazes but I had eight good men there, we got the ropes around them in the end.’

Rooke could see it: the boat lurching, the native men sprawled in the water slopping about in the bottom, pinned there with the sheer poundage of cursing sailors. He wanted to hear the next part of the tale, in which the natives threw off the sailors, leaped out of the boat, swam ashore, vanished into the woods.

‘I cannot believe that the governor,’ he started, but Gardiner was not listening.

‘They cried out, Rooke,’ Gardiner exclaimed. ‘By God you should have heard them crying out, it would break your heart. The ones left behind as we got away, they were screaming. The wretches in the boat crying out. Oh God. They may be savages, we call them savages. But their feelings are no different from ours.’

He jumped up as if the chair had grown spikes and went over to the window. Rooke could see only his big shoulders, the back of his head. The hut was silent. Even the water at the foot of the rocks was holding its breath.

Rooke half rose out of his chair, not knowing what to do next, only that he could not let Gardiner stand there alone. But as he moved, Gardiner took a long shaky breath that ended in a cough, dragged out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He came back to the table and poured himself a drink, his hands shaking.

‘Well, they are in the hut behind the governor’s house now. He had the shackles put on them, I am glad I did not have to watch that.’

‘You did your duty, that was all.’

How feeble that sounded. What did duty have to do with a man undone by feeling?

‘You did it in the kindliest way. That such a task could be done. Since it had to be done.’

‘Kindly!’ Gardiner repeated. ‘He will put it in that light, you may be sure of it. In London they will all agree. How kindly.
What a splendid fellow, best give him another fifty pound a year.’

Rooke knew Gardiner as well as he knew any man, but had never dreamed that he might speak with this depth of bitterness. Or how some answering sharpness in himself was responding. He had not known how much he had come to dislike the governor, that secretive sour man.

‘
Brought in
, that is what he calls it. The natives were
brought
in
. Never mind that they were kidnapped. Violently. Against their will. They were crying, Rooke, I tried to show them we meant no harm, but they were wailing as if their hearts would break! Who will say how it really was? Tell the truth about it?’

‘Certainly not a pair of lieutenants who know which side their bread is buttered!’ It was an effort to lighten the mood, but Rooke might as well not have spoken.

‘It was by far the most unpleasant service I ever was ordered to execute.’

Gardiner’s voice was low, ashamed. Rooke thought,
And I?
Have I ever been given an order that would shake me, shame me?
Nothing came to his mind. On
Resolution
he could not see the men his blind shots might have reached, if there had been any. In New South Wales he had sidestepped the whole business of being a soldier through the good offices of astronomy. But it was chance, nothing more. There was a coldness in him, knowing that only accident lay between his situation and Gardiner’s.

A loose shingle rattled, the branch of a bush scratched
against the wall. A bird warbled once, twice.

‘I wish to God I had not done it! He should not have given the order, but I wish to God I had not obeyed!’

Gardiner was shouting, the words filling the hut and sailing out the window.

‘For God’s sake, man! Have a care what you say!’

They were private out here, but no degree of privacy was safe when such words were released into the air. The lieutenant who had twirled at the end of the rope that day in English Harbour had not got as far as disobeying. Nor had the other two, the ones Rooke had watched being sent into oblivion. The words had been enough. Here, where all that stood between the governor and chaos was a handful of officers, no hint of insubordination could be tolerated.

‘Our duty,’ he began, ‘our duty as soldiers,’ but his friend had already drawn back. Gardiner drank off his cupful and screwed a grin onto his face that stretched his sunburnt sailor’s lips.

‘Yes, Mr Rooke, I know. Yes, we are all servants of the governor here and the Devil take any man who says different!’

Rooke said nothing more. There was a question forming in the back of his mind, which he did not want to hear. It was:
What would I have done in the same place?